An Easy Way to Reduce Stress in Your Life

31 Jul An Easy Way to Reduce Stress in Your Life

Life is filled with things to stress about. While this emotion is not specific to women, it sometimes feels like women can get easily overwhelmed by stress.

Stress occurs as an offshoot of the different situations we encounter. Over the past few months, we have definitely been offered a range of stressful situations – a pandemic, a looming recession, having small children at home full-time, to name a few.

There are different techniques to help us relieve or ease the feelings of stress like breathing, yoga, meditation, journaling, and they are all great! But women don’t always think of using them and when they do, they only provide short term relief. The situation still remains stressful.

Instead, we need a methodology to eliminate the stress from a situation and empower us to choose our emotions. To help us take responsibility for stress, I invite you to consider a new perspective. At first, it may seem strange, but with practice, you’ll come to see how easy and beneficial it can be.

Consider this: what if stress didn’t exist outside of yourself and therefore, a situation couldn’t be found to be stressful?

It may sound crazy because it changes the whole paradigm around the stress that we’re used to. But IF this is possible, then the onus or responsibility of feeling stressed would be on ourselves. And we become empowered to own our emotions.

Let’s do a little exercise.
Assume we’re suddenly stuck in traffic. Remember those days, when we drove to meet people and there were a lot of cars on the road. We’re driving to an important meeting and the traffic comes to a dead stop. You see a sign up ahead indicating there has been an accident. Now there is a strong likelihood you’re going to be late. Stressful – yes?

Let’s walk through the process to shift our emotions together.

Question 1 – Is that situation stressful in itself? Is traffic itself stressful?
Answer: not really, it’s just sitting in a car. Traffic itself really isn’t stressful. (Note how we eliminated the consequences of the situation from the actual situation.)

Question 2 – What do I need to believe to experience stress in that specific situation? In other words, what is the belief(s) I have about the situation that is causing me to feel stressed about it? (This is where we bring in all the consequences. Go wild.)

Answer: For traffic to be stressful, I would have to believe that:

• The other person is going to be mad at me
• They are going to think less of me
• Being late is my fault because I didn’t leave earlier

Question 3 – What would I need to believe in order to reduce or remove stress related to this particular situation? (Here’s where we get to shift our perspective on the situation so we can eliminate the stress from the situation.)

Answer: I need to believe:

• It’s not my fault there was an accident
• The other person totally understands the situation and won’t think less of me
• I can use this time to relax and enjoy some music or prepare more for the meeting.

By choosing what to believe to remove stress from a situation, we are now in control. And if we can use a process to eliminate stress and choose how we want to feel about a situation, why wouldn’t we?

Cindy Gordon is the founder of Business Rescue Coaching, a boutique coaching firm aimed at helping female entrepreneurs make the money they are worth. Visit our website to learn more about our programs and services at www.BusinessRescueCoaching.com